Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [65]
Four days later, Parker sent Elvis out on his second Hank Snow–Jamboree tour of the month, billed as a “WSM Grand Ole Opry” show, with the added attractions of the Duke of Paducah, and Nashville music legend Mother Maybelle Carter and the Carter Sisters, Helen, June, and Anita. They would tour together again for three weeks in May, but Anita never got over his fevered gyrations, or the crowd’s reactions to them.
“We went out there and watched him, and I said, ‘My Lord!’ The boy had talent, but I couldn’t believe the audience! It was not just young girls—there were people with gray hair out there screaming. Every night, the girls would try to tear his clothes off of him. His buttons were always gone, and Mama would take the buttons off of all our clothes and put them on his. So we were always buttonless!”
Elvis had a huge crush on Anita, who played stand-up bass and sang soprano. Whenever Anita was around, said Red West, Elvis was like “a kid with six pair of feet.” He did anything he could to get her attention.
Meanwhile, Elvis’s relationship with Dixie was still limping along, and he had promised to take her to her junior prom on May 6. But he had shows right up until then—the night before, in fact, a pack of girls chased him across a football field in Mobile, Alabama.
“I was so afraid he was not going to get back in town for my prom, and his mom and I had been shopping, and she had bought my dress.” However, Dixie was more fearful that they would never realize their plans for the future. One day he was unknown, and then “just overnight he was there. It was phenomenal.”
He showed up at her door not in the dark blue suit of his own senior prom, but in a handsome white tuxedo jacket, and in Bob and Helen’s brand-new Lincoln, which he’d borrowed for the evening. They double-dated with Dixie’s best friend, Bessie Wolverton, and Elvis’s cousin, Gene Smith.
It was a storybook evening—he looked like a movie star, and Dixie was proud to show him off to her friends. But she was troubled by the changes in Elvis. She knew in her heart that he had been unfaithful to her, which went against all the teachings of their church. And she didn’t like his new friends, especially Red West, and a crowd of guys who had begun to hang around when Elvis was in town. They all smoked and drank and used offensive language, and the surprising thing was that Elvis seemed to want them around.
Why did he need them? It used to be that all Elvis and Dixie needed was each other, and they were hardly ever alone anymore. And what kind of future were they going to have if he was running around the country all the time?
They argued about it, but they had argued before over his possessiveness. Elvis was always jealous of what she might be doing while he was away, though she had more cause to worry than he did. Yes, she went to Busy Betty on Lamar and danced, but she wasn’t dating anyone. Was she just supposed to sit home for three weeks while he was away? She wanted to have some fun, too.
Friends on both sides had begun to doubt that they would marry, because “neither one would accept the other’s terms,” in the words of Barbara Hearn, who went to school with Dixie at South Side and worked with her at Goldsmith’s department store.
But each time Dixie gave Elvis back his class ring—once or twice he even asked for it back—they’d both cry and want to make up. Sometimes he would angrily speed off in his car, and before she could even get back in the house, he was there again, and they’d sit on the porch and hold each other, both in agony over their decision. What were they going to do?
“It was kind of a mutual thing. His career was going in one direction, and I didn’t feel that I could be a part of it. [It] consumed him, and there wasn’t much time for anything else.”
They kept patching it up, saying they could work it out, but by the end of the summer, they both knew it was over. She had wanted him to stop at the top and go back to a simpler life. But he said, “No, I’m